This Course will clarify the definition and meaning of Social Entrepreneurship and will focus on the need to learn about the source and root of a social problem. You will be introduced to different perspectives about Social Entrepreneurship and you will learn about complementary and opportunistic assets which will help you to detect an opportunity and develop an idea of how to create a business for social change. From a practical perspective you will be asked to initiate a team formation process and start to think about a problem topic that you want to address with your social venture in the future. You will work in a team to research this topic and will gradually start to think about a particular opportunity and identify a purpose for your social venture project.
Peer-evaluation Assignment & Optional Case Assignment
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Do curso por Copenhagen Business School
Identifying Social Entrepreneurship Opportunities
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Who is a Social Entrepreneur
With Module 3 you have reached halftime of Course 1. Congratulations! This Module will answer the question what it takes people to become Entrepreneurs. In addition you will be introduced to the concept of a Community Enterprise. Your personal challenge will be to define your future role within your project team and to think about how to find opportunities to address social problems.
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Kai Hockerts
Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility
As always, your tasks for the coming week will be twofold.
First, I will outline the peer evaluation exam.
Then, I will talk about the optional case assignment.
So let's start with this week's peer evaluation exam.
Here, I would like to ask you to reflect on yourself and
answer the question what it is that you personally bring to your group?
But also, what skills you think you lack?
You may start out by describing your own experience with social issues in the past.
Next, you may want to use some of the categories I've talked in the first video
of this week. Which is your main motivator to start a social enterprise?
Do you feel empathy with the beneficiaries?
Or do you want to act out of a conviction of moral obligation?
How convinced are you, that you are the right person for this task?
What is your self-efficacy?
And what support do you expect to receive from the environment?
Finally, identify your strength.
However, it's also okay to pinpoint your weaknesses and
to describe which specific skills you feel you lack.
It is in these areas that you should look for
group members with complementary traits.
Your grade should not depend on how well you sell yourself, but
also, on how much you're able to reflect on your own limitations, and
how well you're able to identify areas in which you need support.
Remember that peer evaluation exam submissions should be short.
So limit yourself to three to four paragraphs
by focusing on the most important elements.
You may also want to share this contribution with your team members so
to start to get to know each other.
We leave it to you whether you want to share this in the discussion forum or
whether you prefer to take this offline to a closed group discussion.
Your second task is the optional case assignment.
In the subsequent video sequence, I will introduce you to next week's case.
As always, we ask you to think it through.
You're welcome to jot down some thoughts in the case and
share them in the discussion forum.
The case will be about how to identify an opportunity.
Actually, most social entrepreneurs face a dilemma when it comes to
identifying opportunities.
Traditional business theory predicts that organizations aim to acquire
complementary assets which supplement a firm's existing resources.
However, social entrepreneurship tends to combine resources
that do not readily complement each other.
I call these antagonistic assets.
Let's look at some examples of these antagonistic assets.
People with autism spectrum disorder, ASD for example,
are known to experience problems with many social skills.
For example, they lack the ability of making standard conversation.
Moreover, they tend to be obsessive about rituals and prefer repetitive behavior.
Stressful situations in the workplace may provoke irrational behavior.
In consequence, many people with ASD drop out of school early and
find it difficult to get and hold a job.
Similarly, only one in three blind people is employed.
Employers feel that people with ASD, or blind people,
do not complement the requirements of the modern workplace, which calls for
efficiency and an ability to fit into the standard situations.
We also find that boys with ethnic minority backgrounds tend to drop
out of school early.
And they usually are at higher risk of unemployment and
potentially even a criminal career.
Typically these boys grew up in areas with high unemployment, they're not well
integrated into the wider society, and they often face skewed incentive systems.
Failure in school is seen as a badge of honor for them, and they often expect
a criminal career to be the most likely employment opportunity for them.
Other examples of antagonistic assets can be found
at the so-called base of the pyramid.
Poor people do not have essential resources,
such as access to clean drinking water. 1.8 million people, most of them children,
die every year often due to lack of access to sanitation and clean water.
Systems to improve access to clean water require complementary access
to infrastructure investments, electricity and
the presence of a maintenance system that keeps the water cleaning in place.
However, many of the poorest regions in the world lack these complementary assets.
They do not have access to electricity, infrastructure investments, and
spare parts usually are not available.
Access to complementary assets is also a challenge for
many producers at the base of the income pyramid.
Consider producers of handicraft in Africa; often they have to work in
an environment in which they do not have access to a reliable supply of electricity
making the use of modern sewing machines difficult.
For each of these groups described, social enterprises have emerged in
the past years that helped to address the specific problem we have just outlined.
Through a business solution, can you think of an opportunity to help these people?
So this is your optional case assignment for next week.
Pick only one of the beneficiaries I have just described and
try to identify an opportunity to help them through a social enterprise.
In order to give you an inspiration, let me outline here a social enterprise that
has successfully turned the antagonistic assets of one of the beneficiary groups
outlined earlier into an opportunity.
The Danish company Specialisterne employs people with autism spectrum disorder.
As you will see in the following interview with Rob Austin and in the case reading
for today, Specialisterne has succeeded to turn the perceived antagonistic
assets of these beneficiaries into a competitive advantage for the company.
Specialisterne was founded in 2003 by Thorkil Sonne.
After his son Lars was found to have autism spectrum disorder,
Thorkil was deeply frustrated by the conventional wisdom that said Lars
would most likely not be able to hold a job, and
would have to rely on social disability benefits for the remainder of his life.
Having worked with IT problems, Thorkil realize that for
all their social handicaps, people with ASD had two unique skills,
they positively crave repetition and they have an excellent attention to detail.
Drawing on these two strengths of people with ASD, Thorkil launch Specialisterne
with the express goal of harnessing the specific characteristics and
talents of people with autism, and to use them as a competitive advantage and
as a means to help people with autism to secure meaningful employment.
Spesialisterne offers IT services around software management,
data logistics and software testing.
About 75% of Specialisterne employees are people with ASD.
The remaining staff provide support services to help the ASD employees cope
with the challenging situations that emerge from the ASD condition.
So let me sum up this week's optional case assignment.
Take one of the other cases that I have just described earlier on and
see whether you can find an opportunity to address these social problems.
Get inspiration from the Specialisterne case.
Just pick one of the groups, for example blind people; youth from ethnic minority
backgrounds; people lacking access to clean water; or handicraft producers in Africa.
At the beginning of next week,
we will discuss how to identify opportunities for each of these.
And of course, do not forget to submit your peer evaluation exam on the question:
what do you yourself bring to your group?
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